People of the Dark Read Free Page A

go anywhere, Jack? I don't understand that. No one has to go anywhere."
    "They're going somewhere, Erika?" I asked.
    "Sure. They say they're going to heaven. They say they're going to be with God. And I don't understand. No one has to go anywhere for that."
     
    S he is short—about five feet five, dark, curvaceous, and very smart. She used to say now and then, "You still think you're smarter than I am, don't you?" And I used to shake my head glumly and admit that I wasn't. She never believed me; she always thought I was humoring her.
    She was the one who made the decision to buy the farmhouse. A week after seeing the house, we were watching reruns of The Good Neighbors on TV, and she said, without looking at me, "I want to buy that house, Jack."
    "Which one?" I asked. We'd looked at six or seven houses in the past couple of weeks.
    "That big farmhouse," she answered. "The one with the privet hedge."
    "Oh," I said. "Why?"
    "Because I think it's charming," she answered, and she glanced quickly at me, smiled, added, "And I think we can be happy there."
    "Aren't we happy here?" Here was a townhouse apartment just south of Syracuse, New York.
    " Happier , there," she said.
    We moved in a month and a half later. Jim Sandy came over with his backhoe to dig a trench and lay ceramic tile and PVC pipe two weeks after that.
     
    E rika was in the city that day, working. She owned a small record shop that kept her away from home quite a lot because she was devoted to it and felt that with enough devotion it might make a good deal of money someday.
    I watched as Jim Sandy towed his backhoe up the long, steep driveway, started it, unloaded it. I expected that he'd come and announce himself, but he didn't. He chugged around to the side of the house, the treads of the backhoe chewing up the lawn and spitting out huge divots. Then, with a great thud, the shovel sank into the earth and he started to work. From a kitchen window, I watched him for a few minutes. He looked at me once; I smiled and waved at him. He nodded stiffly from the cab of the backhoe. It made me feel instantly that, even from behind the window, I was somehow in his way, so I busied myself with some unpacking and listened to the grinding chugga-chugga of the backhoe.
    That chugga-chugga stopped a half hour or so after it started. I waited for it to start again, and when, after a few minutes, it didn't, I went to the kitchen window and looked out. The backhoe was a good fifty feet from where it had been a half hour earlier, and its shovel was stuck into the earth. I didn't see Jim Sandy and decided that he'd probably had to relieve himself and felt more comfortable behind a tree or the garage.
    I pressed my face into the kitchen window. I looked right and left, but I didn't see him. And when I turned from the window, thinking that whatever he was doing was his business, anyway, I saw him at the screen door, his hand raised, fist clenched, ready to knock. He knocked once on the screen door, opened it, knocked again on the inside door, saw me through its window, opened the door, and came in.
    "Hi," I said. "What's up?"
    He nodded, again stiffly, to indicate the area he'd been working in. "I dug up somethin' out there," he said.
    "Oh?" I said.
    "Yeah. I dug up an arm. I dug up someone's arm."

CHAPTER TWO
     
    E rika screwed her face up and said, "That's disgusting, Jack. Did you look at it?"
    "Sure I did," I told her. "Why not?"
    "What did it look like?" she asked. "Was it a skeleton? Was it just bones?"
    "Mostly," I said. "There was some skin attached to it. It looked like a rolled-up grocery bag, Erika. There was nothing upsetting about it."
    "And was there anything else?" Now, her look of disgust was mixed with curiosity.
    "Anything else?"
    "Sure. You find an arm and you'll probably find other things."
    "Nothing yet, Erika."
    She rolled her eyes. "That's comforting."
    "This bothers you, doesn't it?" I said.
    "Huh?" she said, clearly incredulous.
    "I asked if this bothered